Thursday, December 5, 2013

Window on Eurasia: Ukrainian Events Leave Russians Feeling More Isolated from Their Neighbors

Paul
Goble

Staunton, December 5 – The hostility
many Ukrainians feel toward Moscow that has been very much on display this week
in the demonstrations in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities has led many Russians
to drop Ukraine from the list of “the main friends” of Russia, according to a
new poll.

That list now includes only Belarus,
Kazakhstan and Armenia, the Public Opinion Foundation says, a remarkable
narrowingof that circle and a trend
that simultaneously reduces the significance of the CIS as a whole and leaves
many Russians feeling increasingly isolated and alone (svpressa.ru/society/article/78467/).

In
an article entitled “[The Customs] Union in Place of the Commonwealth [of
Independent States],” posted on the Svobodnaya pressa.ru portal yesterday,
Vasily Vankov note that while 45 percent of Russians say Russian-Belarusian
relations are friendly and 39 percent say that of Russian-Kazkhstan ties, only
13 percent say Russian-Armenian relation are.

Despite
that low figure for Armenia, Vankov says, it is high enough for Armenia to “occupy
an honored third place,” and it underscores just how few Russians view
Ukrainians or any other former Soviet republic as a friend. The absence of
Ukraine on this list is especially striking given the Kremlin’s effort to
promote it as “’a fraternal Slavic people.’”

According
to the poll, Russians have the most negative attitudes toward Georgia (49
percent say its relations with their country are unfriendly), Ukraine (37
percent), and Moldova (22 percent), a reflection of the pursuit by the
governments of these countries of expanded ties with the European Union.

Despite
such attitudes, 58 percent of Russians say that they favor uniting the majority
of CIS countries “into a single state”
and “positively assess the reconstruction of Soviet reality, considering it as
an era of economic development and social well-being,” attitudes that help explain
why some of the former Soviet republics are increasingly looking toward Europe.

Vankov interviewed three close
Russian observers of these developments for their assessments.Azhdar Kurtov, editor of the RISI journal “Problems
of National Strategy,” said that Moscow had miscalculated in thinking that
concessionary prices and preferences to its neighbors would lead to improved
relations.

That has not happened, Kurtov said,
and consequently, some in Moscow are now calling for harsher policies.Moscow won’t be able to avoid at least some
of them, he continued, because there is now a serious struggle going on between
Moscow and the outside world for influence in the region.

Aleksey Vlasov, executive director
of the NorthSouth Political Analyst
Center, said that one should take a longer view. When there are tensions
between Russia and a neighbor, many are inclined to talk about them in
apocalyptic terms, but in most cases, the situation corrects itself with
time.The only country where that is not
the case, he said, has been Georgia, but even there improvements are possible.

He said that he did not see a danger
that Moscow would be “too attracted” to the use of force against its neighbors
in the name of uniting them under it influence. Instead, he said, Russians will
continue to seek cooperation with their neighbors, with the older generation viewing
the revival of the USSR as necessary and younger seeing integration as a
requirement.

In order to win friends, Vlasov
continued, “it is important to use not only harsh mechanisms but also the
much-talked-about ‘soft force.’”Moscow
has failed in the latter and “already lost entire generations of our neighbors
in the post-Soviet space,” as events in Ukraine show.There, it is the young who are “the drivers”
for European integration.

Russia’s agitation and propaganda
are “hopelessly” losing this competition.“Our leadership continues to think in the categories of macro-economic
indicators,” forgetting that for many of those involved economics is far from the
only or most important factor in their decision making.

Leonid Ivashov, president of the Academy
of Geopolitical Problems, agreed. He said that Russia needs but does not have a
geopolitical strategy and all too often relies on economics alone. “Neither
Gazprom nor Rosneft nor other oligarchic monopolies think in the categories of
geopolitics. They need immediate profit according to the principle of ‘here and
now.’”

According to Ivashov, Russia needs
to define itself in civilizational term and to look first to its own internal
arrangements to make it a center of attraction for others. Unless it does so
and soon, he implied, it will not be able to win over let alone retain what
friends and partners it now has.